![]() It was so you could just copy-paste its symbols into a body of text without having to make it an image or anything. The intention for Wingdings, then, was never to be typed. For example, the Unicode for the smiley face emoji is “U+263A.” The thing about Unicode is that it wasn’t widely adopted until after 2010, so there was no unicode for, say, the square (U+25A1) in the 90s. You probably know Unicode as the sequence of letters (U+) that go with your emojis. The name “Unicode” probably rings at least a few bells. Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 just expanded on this. Our first version of Wingdings was made up of mostly shapes and widely recognized symbols like some religious iconography, arrows, zodiac signs, and versions of the ampersand. The font would appear in Windows 3.1 in 1992 and was patented in 1993. Wingdings was developed in 1990, licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes by Microsoft for use in Windows. This way, typesetters didn’t have to carve unique ones for every combination of letters that could go inside an ornamental frame. Instead of having to manually create these unique symbols every time, typesetters just had these stamps on hand that could be mixed and matched. You know, like those curvy lines that go around words to make them special. You might also see dingbats outlining text as an ornament. In typography, dingbats are also known as “printer’s characters,” and you can understand them as unique symbols or characters in typesetting. Wingdings is a specific type of font, called a dingbat font. We should probably start with what Wingdings as a font even is. So what’s up with the Wingdings font? What Is Wingdings? All of that, or you just remember using older versions of Microsoft Word as an adult, but never had to experiment with the Wingdings font and now you want to know why it exists. Then used it as some kind of code because that’s what kids do. There were also different variants of Wingdings, if you poked around with Wingdings at all, you probably remember Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3, or the one just called “Symbols.” Unless you know how to actually use these fonts, you probably just learned what each symbol corresponded to on your keyboard or something. ![]() If you’re in the age range where you were messing with word processors in school as a kid, you probably have a vague memory of that Wingdings font in Microsoft Word. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |